If your child attends multiple child care services, you can choose the amount of hours we pay to each service.

By default, we pay each child care service in the order that we get their attendance reports for your child. We do this unless you allocate how many hours of Child Care Subsidy you want each service to get.

You can let us know how you want your hours allocated by calling the Families line.

If your apportionment of hours has stopped for any of the above reasons you will need to call the Families line to reallocate how many hours you want each service to get.

Example where a family haven’t allocated their hours

Jim gets Child Care Subsidy for 36 hours a fortnight. His daughter, Lily, attends 2 different child care services each fortnight. She attends the first service for 24 hours a fortnight, and the second service for 18 hours a fortnight.

Because Jim hasn’t allocated his hours, we subsidise the full hours for the service that sends their session report first.

In this example, the second child care service submits their session report first. We’ll subsidise the 18 hours that Lily attended this service. We’ll then subsidise the remaining 18 hours for the first service when we get their session report.

Example where a family has allocated their hours

Susan gets Child Care Subsidy for 100 hours a fortnight. Her son, Jacob, attends 3 different child care services each fortnight. He attends the first child care service for 50 hours a fortnight. He attends the second and third services for 30 hours each per fortnight.

Susan asked us to allocate her hours so that the first service gets the full 50 hours subsidised. She asks for the second service to also be subsidised for the full 30 hours. We will pay the remaining hours to the third service. We pay it this way regardless of which service submits their session report first.